How Gobbledygook Ended Up in Respected Scientific Journals

Nobel winner Peter Higgs says that today, he wouldn't be "productive enough" to land an academic job.

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

In 2005, a group of MIT graduate students decided to goof off in a very MIT graduate student way: They created a program called SCIgen
that randomly generated fake scientific papers. Thanks to SCIgen, for
the last several years, computer-written gobbledygook has been routinely
published in scientific journals and conference proceedings.

According to Nature News,Cyril Labbé, a French computer scientist, recently informed
Springer and the IEEE, two major scientific publishers, that between
them, they had published more than 120 algorithmically-generated
articles. In 2012, Labbé had told the IEEE of another batch of 85 fake
articles. He's been playing with SCIgen for a few years—in 2010 a fake
researcher he created, Ike Antkare, briefly became the 21st most highly
cited scientist in Google Scholar's database.

On the one hand, it's impressive that computer programs are now good
enough to create passable gibberish. (You can entertain yourself by
trying to distinguish real science from nonsense on quiz sites like this one.)
But the wide acceptance of these papers by respected journals is
symptomatic of a deeper dysfunction in scientific publishing, in which
quantitative measures of citation have acquired an importance that is
distorting the practice of science.

The first scientific journal article, “An Account of the improvement of Optick Glasses," was published on March 6, 1665 in Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society of London. The purpose of the journal, according to Henry Oldenburg,
the society's first secretary, was, "to spread abroad Encouragements,
Inquiries, Directions, and Patterns, that may animate." The editors continued,
explaining their purpose: "there is nothing more necessary for
promoting the improvement of Philosophical Matters, than the
communicating to such, as apply their Studies and Endeavours that way,
such things as are discovered or put in practice by others." They hoped
communication would help scientists to share "ingenious Endeavours and
Undertakings" in pursuit of "the Universal Good of Mankind."

As the spate of nonsense papers shows, scientific publishing has strayed from these lofty goals. How did this happen?

Over the course of the second half of the 20th century,
two things took place. First, academic publishing became an enormously
lucrative business. And second, because administrators erroneously
believed it to be a means of objective measurement, the advancement of
academic careers became conditional on contributions to the business of
academic publishing.

As Peter Higgs said after he won last year's Nobel Prize in physics,
"Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't
think I would be regarded as productive enough." Jens Skou, a 1997 Nobel
Laureate, put it this way in his Nobel biographical statement: today's
system puts pressure on scientists for, "too fast publication, and to
publish too short papers, and the evaluation process use[s] a lot of
manpower. It does not give time to become absorbed in a problem as the
previous system [did]."

Today, the most critical measure of an academic article's importance
is the “impact factor” of the journal it is published in. The impact
factor, which was created by a librarian named Eugene Garfield in the
early 1950s, measures how often articles published in a journal are
cited. Creating the impact factor helped make Garfield a
multimillionaire—not a normal occurrence for librarians.

In 2006, the editors of PloS Medicine, then a new journal,
were miffed at the capriciousness with which Thomson Scientific (which
had bought Garfield’s company in 1992), calculated their impact factor.
The PloS editors argued for "better ways of assessing papers and journals"—new quantitative methods. The blossoming field of scientometrics (with its own eponymous journal—2012 impact factor: 2.133)
aims to come up with more elaborate versions of the impact factor that
do a better job of assessing individual articles rather than journals as
a whole.

There is an analogy here to the way Google and other search engines
index Web pages. So-called search-engine optimization aims to boost the
rankings of websites. To fight this, Google (and Microsoft, and others)
employ armies of programmers to steadily tweak their algorithms. The
arms race between the link spammers and the search-algorithm authors
never ends. But no one at Thomson Reuters (or its competitors) can
really formulate an idea of scientific merit on par with Google’s idea of search quality.

Link spam is forced upon even reputable authors of scientific papers.
Scientists routinely add citations to papers in journals they are
submitting to in the hopes of boosting chances of acceptance. They also
publish more papers, as Skou said, in the hopes of being more widely
cited themselves. This creates a self-defeating cycle, which tweaked
algorithms cannot address. The only solution, as Colin Macilwain wrote
in Nature last summer, is to “Halt the avalanche of performance metrics.”

There is some momentum behind this idea. In the past year, more than 10,000 researchers have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment,
which argues for the "need to assess research on its own merits." This
comes up most consequentially in academic hiring and tenure decisions.
As Sandra Schmid, the chair of the Department of Cell Biology at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a signatory of the San
Francisco Declaration, wrote, "our signatures are meaningless unless we
change our hiring practices. … Our goal is to identify future colleagues
who might otherwise have failed to pass through the singular artificial
CV filter of high-impact journals, awards, and pedigree.”

Unless academic departments around the world follow Schmid's example,
in another couple of years, no doubt Labbé will find another few
hundred fake papers haunting the databases of scientific publication.
The gibberish papers (“TIC: a methodology for the construction of
e-commerce”) are only the absurdist culmination of an academic
evaluation and publication process set up to encourage them.

In New York City, just try to find a therapist even with Medicare

More
than 3.7 million mentally ill and uninsured people will remain without
care in the 25 states which have refused to expand Medicaid. That's
according to a new report from the American Mental Health Counselors Association.

The problem is most acute in Florida and Texas, both home to
more than half a million uninsured adults with serious mental health
and substance use conditions.
The 11 southern states that are not moving toward Medicaid expansion
are home to 2.7 million people with mental illness. Virginia, North
Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri and
Mississippi each have between 100,000 and 200,000 such uninsured adults.
Georgia has 233,000 residents who suffer from mental illness, according
to data compiled through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration.

These 25 states have about 55 percent of all uninsured people with mental illness,
the Association reports. Mental health, including substance abuse,
treatment is now included as an essential health benefit in all health
insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. That is, for those who
aren't left out.

Recently, a team of physicists was bombarding a film of
gallium arsenide with a mode-locked titanium-sapphire laser. They
focused the beam into an incredibly fine dot, just 100 nm, pulsed the
beam for 320 femtosectonds (320 quadrillionths of a second), and waited
to see what happened. You know, just another day in the lab.

Well, waiting might be an overstatement. What the team was looking
for were quasiparticles known as excitons, which they found in spades.
But when they cranked the frequency of the laser pulses up to 100
million per second, they stumbled upon something they never
unexpected—an entirely new quasiparticle that flashed into existence for
25 millionths of a second, then vanished. They’re calling it a quantum
droplet, or dropleton.

A rendering of dropletons

The dropleton, it turns out, is an especially bizarre species of an
already curious phenomenon. It’s close relative, the exciton, is formed
when photons strike a semiconductor and knock an electron loose,
creating a hole where the electron used to be. (That’s essentially how
solar cells work. In fact, gallium arsenide, the material used in this
experiment, works as a photovoltaic.)

But rather than the hole created by the loosed electron simply
existing as empty space, it exerts a weak force that reaches out to the
electron. If the electron stays connected with the hole through that
Coulomb force, the pair form a quasiparticle known as an exciton. The
team from Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany and the Joint
Institute for Lab Astrophysics at the University of Colorado had created
plenty of excitons.

Then they started pulsing the laser faster and faster. Above 100
million pulses per second, the electrons and holes started pooling
together, forming clumps of four, five, and six electron/holes that
behaved unlike anything previously studied. They swam around each other,
like H2O molecules in a drop of water, and they formed ripple rings like the disturbed surface of a pond.
Clara Moskowitz, reporting for Scientific American:

The unexpected quasiparticle got its name when the
researchers realized, “It has to be a new particle, it has a small size,
it has liquid properties,” [Mackillo] Kira, [one of the paper’s
authors,] recalls. “Okay, let’s call it a dropleton.”
“This is new physics, not just a small detail of well-established
physics,” says Glenn Solomon of the Joint Quantum Institute in
Gaithersburg, Md., who was not involved in the research. “Hopefully, it
will spark a variety of experiments.”

Those experiments should yield some interesting results, thanks to
another unique property of the dropleton—its immense size, at least for a
quasiparticle. At 182 nanometers across, it’s large enough to be
observed with a microscope. That could open a new window into the world
where light and matter meet.

Apps | better smartphone typing is a tap away

Touch-screen phones have
become very good at some tasks but there is one feature that they still
struggle to get right–the keyboard. Here are some apps and some setting
tweaks to assist your fingers.
Touch-screen phones have become so astonishingly good at some tasks
they have all but replaced landline phones, pocket cameras and printed
maps. But there is one feature that they still struggle to get right —
the keyboard.
The flexibility of the full touch screen has won out over tactile,
physical buttons, leaving us with a keyboard that is just an image on
glass and small keys that sometimes get cranky around big thumbs.

Fleksy App – features video

Still,
users don’t have to settle for the default keyboard on their
smartphone. The advantage to virtual keyboards is just that — they are
virtual — and can be easily swapped or altered for one you like better.
Sometimes all it takes is a change in your settings. At most, it
requires buying an app.

Here’s a
sampling of tips and apps to help improve your typing experience on
Apple iOS and Android, the two most popular operating systems for
smartphones.

Fewer Taps

Many smartphone
users make the mistake of tapping out whole words one letter at a time.
A quick way to speed up typing on almost all phones is through
predictive text. Once the feature is turned on, the device will predict
what word you are typing after filling in only a letter or two. Choosing
the full word takes just a single tap.

To turn on
predictive text, you’ll have to dig through the menus, under settings.
Look for the keyboard options and select “auto correction,” or whatever
the similar name is on your phone. Then start typing, and when the
complete word appears, usually in a list just above the keyboard, tap
it. The best part is, the predictions usually improve over time, as the
device learns which words you prefer. So the more you use it, the more
time it will save you.

Fast Keyboard - Universal Text Editor

Fast Keyboard app

Another option is using a nonstandard keyboard layout, like the one provided by Fast Keyboard,
a free app for Apple products. With the app, you won’t need to keep
switching the keyboard from letters to numbers — they all appear on the
same screen. Symbol keys like hashtags appear on the screen, too, and
cut, copy and other functions are also within reach.

The downside of
the app (and other auxiliary keyboards for Apple products) is that it
doesn’t completely replace the default keyboard. It can be used for
certain apps, like e-mail, text messaging and social media. Android
replacement keyboards can work with all of its functions and apps.

Fleksy

Fleksy,
a free iPhone app meant to help the visually impaired, can help you
type without looking at all. Just approximate tapping where you think
letters belong on a keyboard. When you have completed a word, flick the
screen to the right. Fleksy will read its guess aloud. Flick down for it
to guess similar words. The sloppier you are the better it seems to
work. But as with other auxiliary iPhone keyboards, it can’t completely
replace the standard keyboard.

Handy Code

If
you find yourself repeatedly using the same phrases over and over — and
who doesn’t? — so-called typing expansion programs are for you. When
using these programs, you assign an abbreviation like “omw” to
automatically turn into “I’m on my way home, honey, need anything?”

Typing
expansion is built into Apple products and the free Android app Google
Keyboard. For Apple products, go to Settings, then select General and
then Keyboard. Click Add a New Shortcut, then enter the abbreviation and
phrase you want it to become. In Google Keyboard, open the app and go
to Personal Dictionary. Touch the plus sign and then add your
abbreviation and phrase. Press done and the back button. One tip for all
the devices: Make sure your shortcuts use unusual letter combinations
so you don’t activate phrases at unwanted times.

Gesture
keyboards figure out what you mean to type as you to trace your finger
loosely over the keys. It is faster than single-letter typing, but
before it becomes really accurate, it has to learn your patterns.
Sometimes, the process can be exasperating. One keyboard developer said
it takes at least 50 messages for these programs to learn your patterns.

Swiftkey app video tutorial

Swiftkey

Swiftkey,
a $4 app for Android, has an additional way to increase accuracy right
off the bat. Give the app access to your Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail
accounts and it will observe your vocabulary to better anticipate words
you are likely to use. It has recently added a cloud backup service that
saves your personal dictionary of often-used phrases in case your
device is lost or dies. It also searches the Web for phrases coming into
heavy use (like “sarin,” “twerking” or “Middleton”) to better guess
what you are typing.

Swype

Swype app

Swype,
a popular $1 gesture-based keyboard app for Android, can also check
your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts to improve accuracy, but it
has long had a feature called “living language.” Activate it to
anonymously collect new and unfamiliar words from across the Web and add
them to the dictionary.

Many phones
already have gesture typing if you look in the settings. Usually it is
under a heading like “Language and Keyboard” or “Language and Input.”

For Apple
products there are Swiftkey and Swype imitators but, like the previously
mentioned Fleksy, they can be used only for writing text.

Privacy Settings

There is a
potentially alarming side to predictive technology. It is possible for
an app to collect data that you would not want it to. Here is a warning
that appeared when installing Google Keyboard: “This input method may be
able to collect all of the text you type, including personal data like
passwords and credit card numbers. It comes from the app Google
Keyboard. Use this input method?”

While
reputable developers will tell you in their privacy policies that they
don’t collect credit cards and passwords, you can take steps on your
own.

Touch-screen phones have become astonishingly good
at some tasks but there is one feature that they still struggle to get
right–the keyboard. Here are some apps and some easy setting adjustments
to assist your fingers.

In 2003, voters in the Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority's
(HCMTA) service area approved a referendum on the expansion of light
rail. Tom Delay intervened, and overrode the voters' choice. Light
rail expansion in Houston was blocked by the George W Bush
administration for five years. Suddenly, in 2009, the ban was lifted by
the President's new FTA. Every year, the FTA has sent the HCMTA at
least $150 million for light rail expansion. On December 20, 2013, the
first new line, Northline-Houston Community College, went into service.
This year, two more light rail lines will open.

The suburbanites are complaining because HCMTA is concentrating on
the democratic-majority Houston center city. They want commuter light
rail to their outlying areas but keep electing republicans who are
adamantly opposed to rail expansion. Somehow Houston suburbanites have
not made the connection between whom they vote for and what kind of
transportation they get.
HCMTA recently announced that additional cars have been added to
Northline (named after a 1950's shopping mall) because passenger
boardings have exceeded forecasts. HCMTA removes motor vehicle lanes
and allocates them to rail. Unlike other new light rail systems, HCMTA
is operating the lines as limited-stop streetcars, which is unique in
the modern US. Northline has cut the travel time in half from the 15
Fulton Bus which it replaced. I talked to many passengers, and every
person I talked to is thrilled about the huge improvement in service.
The new line runs every 12 minutes, seven days a week. I recently took
a Sunday photographic stroll on the line and uploaded the video to You
Tube.

None of this much-needed expansion would have been possible without
President Obama. Thanks to federal help, and the backing of Democratic
Mayor Annise Parker, these lines are going in fast. On the Northline,
it took less that 3 years from the original groundbreaking to the start
of service. Houston, which was the least-likely city to embark on
electric rail transit 15 years ago, has an aggressive rail transit
program underway. Elections do make a difference.

The web turns 25

On
this NeXT computer, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee devised the basic
principles of the World Wide Web, while working at CERN in the late
1980s and early 1990s.

The World Wide Web is growing up. It turns 25 on March 12 — if you use the date Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper proposing the system as the birthday of the Web.

The
Web is now woven in our everyday lives. We use it for everything, from
looking up directions to chatting with friends and family thousands of
miles of away. Can you even remember the last time you went a day
without the Web?

The first report, released this morning,
uses Pew’s extensive research on technology in American life, which
dates back to 1990 when Pew first asked a question about computer use in
a national survey. The report also includes telephone interviews
conducted in January of 2014 to look at internet penetration and how
Americans feel about the internet. Those interviews surveyed 1,006
adults living in the continental United States, including 502 with
landline phones and 504 cell phones, 288 of which didn’t have a landline
phone.

Those telephone interviews show that Americans generally
feel the internet has made a positive impact on their lives and personal
relationships.

“After they tote up all the positives and
negatives of life in the digital age, the vast majority of users believe
these technologies have made things better for them and for society,”
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center Internet Project said.
“They see problems, to be sure, but most have now brought technology so
deeply into the rhythms of their lives that they say it would be very
hard to give up.”Here are some of the key findings of the survey:The internet is ingrained into American life

71 percent of adults in the U.S. say they use the internet on a typical day.

The internet is good

90
percent of internet users say the internet has been a good thing for
them personally, while 6 percent say it has been a bad thing and 3
percent volunteer that it has been some of both.

76 percent of
users say the internet has been a good thing for society, while 15
percent say it has been a bad thing and 8 percent say it has been
equally good and bad.

The internet is essential

53
percent of internet users say the internet would be, at minimum, “very
hard” to give up. That’s more than those who say cell phones,
televisions and landlines would be “very hard” to give up.

39 percent of internet users feel they absolutely need to have internet access.

30 percent of internet users said it would be hard to give up access because they simply enjoy being online.

The internet has strengthened relationships

67
percent of internet users say their online communication with family
and friends has generally strengthened those relationships, while 18
percent say it generally weakens those relationships.

76 percent
of internet users said that people they witnessed or encountered online
were mostly kind, while 13 percent of people said were mostly unkind.

56
of internet users say they have seen an online group come together to
help a person or a community solve a problem, while 25 percent say they
left an online group because the interaction became too heated or
members were unpleasant to one another.

“Looking back at the
origins of the Web, we can see patterns of use and non-use that persist
today,” Susannah Fox, co-author of the Pew Research Center report
said. “A person’s level of education is still a primary factor in
predicting whether she uses technology or not. And the younger someone
is, the more likely it is that she uses technology. One constant is that
users, whenever they start, say that digital communications tools
strengthen their relationships.”
Do you feel the same way about the internet?

The former labor secretary reveals how our
country has abandoned the winning formula it developed post-World War II

Why has America forgotten the three most important economic lessons we learned in the 30 years following World War II?

Before I answer that question, let me remind you what those lessons were:

First, America’s real job creators are consumers, whose rising wages generate jobs and growth. If average people don’t have decent wages there can be no real recovery and no sustained growth.
In
those years, business boomed because American workers were getting
raises, and had enough purchasing power to buy what expanding businesses
had to offer. Strong labor unions ensured American workers got a fair
share of the economy’s gains. It was a virtuous cycle.

Second,
the rich do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy
than they do with a large share of an economy that’s barely growing at
all.
Between 1946 and 1974, the economy grew faster than
it’s grown since, on average, because the nation was creating the
largest middle class in history. The overall size of the economy
doubled, as did the earnings of almost everyone. CEOs rarely took home
more than 40 times the average worker’s wage, yet were riding high.

Third,
higher taxes on the wealthy to finance public investments — better
roads, bridges, public transportation, basic research, world-class K-12
education, and affordable higher education – improve the future
productivity of America. All of us gain from these investments,
including the wealthy.

In those years, the top marginal
tax rate on America’s highest earners never fell below 70 percent. Under
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower the tax rate was 91 percent.
Combined with tax revenues from a growing middle class, these were
enough to build the Interstate Highway system, dramatically expand
public higher education, and make American public education the envy of
the world.

We learned, in other words, that broadly shared
prosperity isn’t just compatible with a healthy economy that benefits
everyone — it’s essential to it.
But then we forgot these lessons.
For the last three decades the American economy has continued to grow
but most peoples’ earnings have gone nowhere. Since the start of the
recovery in 2009, 95 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1
percent.
What happened?

For starters, too many of us bought
the snake oil of “supply-side” economics, which said big corporations
and the wealthy are the job creators – and if we cut their taxes the
benefits will trickle down to everyone else. Of course, nothing trickled
down.

Meanwhile,
big corporations were allowed to bust labor unions, whose membership
dropped from over a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to
under 7 percent today

Our roads, bridges, and public-transit
systems were allowed to crumble under the weight of deferred
maintenance. Our public schools deteriorated. And public higher
education became so starved for funds that tuition rose to make up for
shortfalls, making college unaffordable to many working families.

And
Wall Street was deregulated — creating a casino capitalism that caused a
near meltdown of the economy six years ago and continues to burden
millions of homeowners. CEOs began taking home 300 times the earnings of
the average worker.

Part of the reason for this extraordinary
U-turn had to do with politics. As income and wealth concentrated at the
top, so did political power. The captains of industry and of Wall
Street knew what was happening, and some played leading roles in this
transformation.

But why didn’t they remember the lessons learned
in the 30 years after World War II – that widely shared prosperity is
good for everyone, including them?

Perhaps because they didn’t
care to remember. They discovered that wealth is also relative: How rich
they feel depends not just on how much money they have, but also how
they live in comparison to most other people.

As the gap between
America’s wealthy and the middle has widened, those at the top have felt
even richer by comparison. Although a rising tide would lift all boats,
many of America’s richest prefer a lower tide and bigger yachts.

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work
and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at
Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently
as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has
named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last
century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller,
“Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of
Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest,
an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television
appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each
week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine,
and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie
"Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found
at www.robertreich.org.

The months-long assessment
of a conflict of interest by the contractor who conducted the Keystone
XL pipeline environmental review was released by the State Department's
Office of the Inspector General Wednesday. Conclusions: Nothing to see
here, folks. Tempest in a teapot. Move along.
Reaction from environmental advocacy groups and individuals opposed
to the pipeline's construction was swift. Bill McKibben, co-founder of
the climate change advocacy group 350.org and one of the early foes of
Keystone XL who has been arrested several times for his anti-pipeline
protests outside the White House, said:

“The real scandal in Washington is how much is legal. This process has stunk, start to finish.”

While it's not a killer blow to pipeline opponents, the report gives
more ammunition to the forces eager to see Keystone XL thick with
tar-sands petroleum flowing from Alberta to the Gulf Coast:
Calgary-based pipeline builder TransCanada, the oil industry in general,
Republicans, a significant fraction of congressional Democrats, and
many unions, with AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka now firmly in the camp of
the supporters.

Whether driven by profit, by campaign contributions, by
climate-change denial or by desire to create more jobs in an economy
plagued by a tepid recovery for all but the top tier of Americans, those
supporters like to pretend that the fight against Keystone XL is, at
best, a not-in-my-backyard battle rather than merely one front in the
broad struggle to keep as much fossil fuel in the ground as possible.
Even if Secretary of State John Kerry does back bends away from his
tough climate change speech in Jakarta and recommends that President
Obama approve Keystone XL and the president agrees, that won't be the
end of opposition to the pipeline or to extracting dirty petroleum from
the tar sands. In that light, the OIG's report makes little difference.

The FSEIS contractor, London-based Environmental Resources Management, was hired by TransCanada, the builder of the Keystone XL, to supply the State Department with the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement
on the pipeline. Environmental advocates objected to the FSEIS as
flawed and incomplete just like the two previous versions. But months
before the impact statement was published, they had objected to who was
writing it on the grounds that ERM—which has strong ties to the oil
industry, including membership in the American Petroleum Institute—had
not been forthcoming about its relationship with TransCanada.
Please read below the fold for more analysis.

The 35-page OIG report concluded:

[I]n the case of concerns raised about ERM’s alleged lack of
objectivity because current ERM staff had previously worked for
TransCanada and other oil and pipeline companies, OIG found that the
Department’s conflict of interest review was effective and that the
review’s conclusions were reasonable. Specifically, OIG’s review found
the following: (i) ERM had fully disclosed the prior work histories of
its team members as part of its proposal; (ii) L/OES attorneys had
reviewed and researched the nature of the prior work and had discussed
the prior work with ERM during the pre-selection interview; (iii) L/OES
attorneys had determined that the prior TransCanada work occurred before
the staff began work at ERM and that none of the prior work had
involved Keystone XL; (iv) the Department’s prescribed conflict of
interest guidance provides four factual scenarios that may create
impairments to objectivity;10 (v) the employees’ prior work histories
did not involve any of those four scenarios; (vi) this prior work had
not impaired ERM’s objectivity; (vii) the totality of information
provided by ERM to the Department was not misleading; and (viii) the
Department’s conflict of interest guidance is consistent with pertinent
regulations and case law.
However, OIG did find that the process for documenting the contractor selection process,
including the conflict of interest review, can be improved.

Included in the report were useful but minor recommendations for making those improvements.
In response, Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, which had first spotlighted the conflict-of-interest complaints, said:

"This Inspector General Report raises more questions than it
answers. In fact it reveals serious errors in the State Department’s
process for vetting conflicts of interest. It’s conclusion that the
agency followed its procedures, seems to rest mainly on interviews with
State Department lawyers who, the report points out, never documented
all of the supposed due diligence they were conducting.
There are notable failures in the process, including the fact that
ERM only disclosed its relationship with TransCanada after they were
awarded the contract; even though conflicts of interest were supposed to
be one of the criteria. This is not reassuring, but we’re hopeful that
the GAO will get to the bottom of this.

350.org Policy Director Jason Kowalski said:

“Far from exonerating the State Department of wrongdoing,
the Inspector General report simply concludes that such dirty dealings
are business as usual. While allowing a member of the American Petroleum
Institute to review a tar sands oil pipeline may technically be legal,
it’s by no means responsible."

Tom Steyer, the billionaire founder of NextGen Climate Action who has pledged
to spend $100 million on ads going after congressional and
gubernatorial candidates governorships who refuse to act on climate
change, said:

“It is disappointing that the Inspector General’s office
chose to conduct such a narrow review of the FEIS process, especially
given the important role that it will play in informing the President’s
decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. This was a missed opportunity to
seriously investigate the integrity of the FEIS document and process.
The State Department did not actually consider the test established
by the President during his speech at Georgetown last June: that no
project that increases the amount of air pollution will be approved.
Additionally it ignores statements by the tar sands executives that the
Keystone XL pipeline is the key to their ability to develop the tar
sands. As I have said before, the FEIS is a flawed document, and it
would be a disservice to President Obama and his legacy on climate
change to rely on this report.”

Elijah Zarlin, CREDO's senior campaign manager said:

"Secretary of State John Kerry inherited this mess, and now
it's time for him to bring it to a close by stating what is obvious—that
this pipeline is not in our national interest. If he doesn't, more than
78,000 Americas stand ready to risk arrest to stop the White House and
the State Department from putting the oil industry’s interest before our
national interest, and recommending approval of Keystone XL.”

Even if Kerry and Obama have already made up their minds on how they
will stand on Keystone XL, a publicly announced decision is still months
away. The State Department has opened public comments up until March 7,
and a 90-day federal interagency review does not end until April 30.
The earliest announcement, therefore, would be May 1, but probably at
least several weeks later.
That depends, however, on when the situation in Nebraska gets
resolved. A state district judge ruled recently that transferring
authority to approve a new pipeline route from Nebraska's Public Service
Commission to the governor was unconstitutional. TransCanada made the
change as a result of President Obama's rejection of its first
application for a permit to build the pipeline through wetlands in the
state. PSC commissioners say they will wait to see what happens to court
appeals of the judge's decision. If it's upheld, they will have seven
months, possibly extended to 12 to approve or reject the new route.

Quiz

Zero Mostel was born February 28, 1915, in New York City. In
1942, he debuted as a comedian. In 1947, he appeared in his first
feature film. He was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951. In 1964, he landed the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Mostel continued to perform on stage, screen and TV until his death on September 8, 1977, in Philadelphia.

Contents

Quotes

Zero Mostel was born Samuel Joel Mostel on February 28, 1915,
to a family of Jewish orthodox immigrants in New York City's Lower East
Side. As a child, he took art classes at the Educational Alliance.

After high school graduation, Mostel attended the City College of New
York. He also spent a year at New York University. In 1937, Mostel was
hired as an art teacher as part of the Works Project Administration's
Federal Art Project. In addition to teaching classes at the local Jewish
Y, Mostel gave comical lectures at a number of New York art museums.

Mostel's entertaining lectures soon led to invitations to
perform at parties and supper clubs. In 1942, he debuted as a standup
comedian at Café Society. It was during this time that he was nicknamed
Zero, as in a guy starting from nothing. That same year, Mostel debuted
on Broadway in Keep 'Em Laughing.

In 1943, Mostel took a
break from show business to serve in the Army in World War II. Three
years later, he appeared in his first feature film, DuBarry Was a Lady. Mostel went on to perform in a steady stream of plays and movies until 1951, when he was blacklisted
by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a result, Mostel
struggled to finding acting work until the early 1960s. Shortly
following his comeback, Mostel's leg was seriously injured when he was
hit by a bus. After a year spent recovering, Mostel earned his first
Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway play Rhinoceros. The next year, Mostel brought home a second Tony for his starring role in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In 1964, Mostel landed one of the most famous roles of his career, as Tevye in Jerome Robbins' musical Fiddler on the Roof. Mostel's memorable performance earned him yet another Tony. During the late 1960s, Mostel also starred in the Mel Brooks' comedy The Producers and had his own variety TV show called Zero Hour.

During the 1970s, Mostel continued to make stage, TV and film
performances. The last time he appeared on TV was in a 1977 episode of The Muppet Show. His last stage performance also took place in 1977, as Shylock in The Merchant. After just one performance of the play, Mostel died suddenly of a heart attack on September 8, 1977, in Philadelphia.

About Me

New Trier High School, Winnetka Illinois.... cancer survivor...NYU Grad School of Film and TV...Film Editor....Training Audio/Visual Writer for US Coast Guard...audio visual producer and public relations writer..had some pretty awful bumps along the way (haven't we all) --glad to still be around and in touch with so many friends from the past